Chirac's girlie game, revealed at
last

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George S. Patton, one of the last of our warrior generals
in the tradition of Stonewall Jackson, Pat Cleburne and Phil
Sheridan, understood the differences between friend and foe.
"I would rather have a German division in front of me," he
once exclaimed, "than a French one behind me."

Mark Twain, the original
innocent abroad, tried to put his
finger on what went wrong with
the spawn of Napoleon: "France
has neither winter nor summer nor
morals. Apart from these
drawbacks, it is a fine country.
France has usually been governed
by prostitutes."

Hannibal Lecter, who famously
silenced the lambs, had an entirely
different perspective: "I just love
the French. They taste just like
chicken."

Well, we've all had a lot of fun
with French jokes, and anyone who has surfed the Web over
the past few weeks has discovered the Internet awash in
frogs' legs and other less-appetizing French body parts. M.
Chirac's men find it easier to suck up to the enemy and shoot
their friends, and a lot less dangerous, and yesterday it
looked as if M. Chirac is well on his way to destroying the
United Nations as we know it (which may or may not be a
bad thing).

But all joking aside, the French themselves may have
discovered what it is that makes Frenchmen run at the first
sound of an enemy's guns. All the men have become women,
but without any of the female glories and graces (and none of
the instinctive female courage).

"Men of all generations are suffering," the French
magazine Elle reports, extracting the juice from a study by a
Paris think tank called the Centre de Communication
Avancee. "Men feel diminished, devalued in a society where
things feminine are perceived as positive and all-powerful
values.

"They think women have gone too far, too quickly,
without setting any limit to their demands or ever questioning
themselves."

Modern French men, the magazine asserts, see their
women as "castrating, vengeful, power-hungry and obsessed
by men's sexual performance."

Castrating or not, French women, being women as well as
French, naturally feel cheated. They're still getting paid on
average 30 percent less than men and they still have to
perform most of whatever cleaning is done in a French
household, and it's a Frenchwoman's bad luck that if a
French man ever feels in a fighting mood, he only feels safe in
trying (and occasionally succeeding) to beat up a woman.

The study is based on focus groups, which as any terrified
CEO could tell you, are infallible, or at least effective cover in
explaining to stockholders why and how management
bollixed up the factory. So we can take all this without even a
grain de sel. The researchers interviewed four 12-man
panels of urban professionals and their findings, presented by
Elle to mark International Women's Day, are said to echo the
whining and complaining - not to say nagging - of French
men over the past decade or so.

French men, the researchers say, are driven to distraction
by women, but not in the way of a red-blooded male being
driven to distraction by, say, the image of Catherine
Zeta-Jones. They're encouraged to adopt feminine traits -
sensitivity, compassion, compromise, tenderness - while
retaining some of the virile traits of men.

"Masculinity is in crisis," the magazine reports in a dispatch
from the front of a war that seems to no longer hang in the
balance. "Man no longer exists. Being a male today is a
nightmare. The male identity feels battered by the paradoxical
demands of women ... and a society that is going their way,
from law, morality to advertising and techniques of
reproduction ... . One gets the impression that a new war of
the sexes is emerging, with the former dominated becoming
the dominatrixes." Men, in a word, are becoming the sexual
toys of women.

This may sound like the stuff of every teenage boy's
fevered fantasies, but girlie boys aren't likely to make very
good soldiers, and is behind M. Chirac's bizarre reasoning
that the way to resist Saddam Hussein is to embrace him with
a permanent bureaucracy of weapons inspectors. (Hans Blix
would become the madam of the whorehouse.)

By making America the villain of the piece, M. Chirac
hopes to gather the resentful of the world around him to
create a bipolar globe. Whenever he needs soldiers, he can
use rented thugs from Africa, which explains his sloppy-kiss
courtship of the likes of Robert Mugabe. When the United
Nations slips into history, he can enlist Kofi Annan as his
sergeant major.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair appear to be on to all the
nuances of French conniving. Hence the new resolution,
which they know will fail, but will expose the ultimate goal of
the axis of weasels, which is not to force Saddam to disarm,
but to enable him to reveal the United States as an atrophied
giant, George W. as Gulliver tied down by the pygmies. Nice
work if he could get it, but George W., it is coming clear, has
been on to M. Chirac's little girlie game from the beginning.